Rob Lyons2015-03-03T14:14:48-05:00Rob Lyonshttp://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/author/index.php?author=rob-lyonsCopyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Rob LyonsGood old fashioned elbow grease.Dear Anna Soubry... You're Wrongtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.25366802013-01-24T19:00:00-05:002013-03-26T05:12:01-04:00Rob Lyonshttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/rob-lyons/
Soubry told the Daily Telegraph that "it was 'heartbreaking' that many of the families who were at greatest risk of obesity were among the poorest in the country".

"A third of our children leave primary school overweight or obese... When I was at school you could tell the demography of children by how thin they were. You could see by looking at their eyes. They would be described as 'the skinny runts' because they were not getting the right food. When I go to my constituency, in fact when I walk around, you can almost now tell somebody's background by their weight... Obviously, not everybody who is overweight comes from deprived backgrounds but that's where the propensity lies".

So are the poor fatter than the rest? This page from The Poverty Site suggests that the relationship is more complex than that. The skinniest group is indeed the richest women, no doubt starving themselves in a desperate attempt to stay thin. (What's so healthy about that?) The next skinniest group, however, is the poorest men. The fattest group is the poorest women. So the poorest 20% of society contains the skinniest men and the fattest women. What can we conclude from this? Not a lot.

It is, in fact, the second quintile that appears to contain the fattest men and the second-fattest women. That is, people with relatively little social pressure to stay thin but enough money to eat as much as they want. But in truth, there is probably only two percentage points of difference between the men in this group and the men in the wealthiest group. Income is not a great guide to obesity rates.

It is not obvious that poor people eat a vastly different diet, in terms of the food groups consumed, to the better-off. A report in 2007 from the UK Food Standards Agency, found: "For many foods, the types and quantities eaten by people on low income appeared similar to those of the general population. Where differences did exist, they were often consistent across different age groups." In other words, differences between young and old were more marked than those between poor and rich. Moreover, broad categories of income disguise a wide variety of differences based on education, ethnicity, attitudes to weight, and so on.

Moreover, there is the assumption in what Soubry said that poverty causes obesity and obesity causes ill health. The upshot of this is that poverty causes ill health. Now, it is true that people on lower incomes tend to die a bit younger than the well-off, but putting that down to obesity is misguided. For starters, as mentioned above, poor people differ from rich people in many different ways. But looking at body weight more specifically, mortality rates for everyone from the upper end of 'normal' (body mass index, BMI, above, say 22) and those who are mildly obese (perhaps up to a BMI of 32 or so) are pretty much the same. And that's the majority of the population.

Nor are obesity rates shooting up. The Health Survey for England published its latest figures in December. For children, it noted: "The prevalence of obesity increased steadily in most years up to around 2004 and 2005, and since then the pattern has been slightly different for boys and girls. Among boys the proportion that was obese has remained at a similarly high level, between 16% and 19%, since 2001. Among girls, there was a signiﬁcant decrease in obesity [my emphasis] between 2005 and 2006, and levels have been maintained at this slightly lower level between 2006 and 2011." In summary, the authors say, rather cautiously: "The lack of signiﬁcant change in levels of obesity in the most recent ﬁve to six years suggests that the trend is ﬂattening out." Far from getting fatter and fatter, kids are at worst no fatter than they were a few years ago and may well have got slimmer.

The real driver for this kind of comment is that Soubry - like many politicians, commentators and activists - believes that because she is well-off, it is her mission to lecture the poor about how to eat and how to live more generally. There is an almost naturalistic assumption of superiority combined with paternalism.

In other times, this would be merely irritating. Maybe Anna Soubry has ambitions to be seen as a straight-talking Tory politician in the mould of Edwina Currie. But today, that paternalistic attitude quickly translates into calls for 'action' - whether it is portion controls, soda and fat taxes, and endless lectures, through to the really authoritarian measures like the removal of children from their homes where obesity is regarded as a form of neglect.

People with low incomes don't need lectures. They could do without being poor, no doubt, but being patronised about their eating habits won't help them one little bit.]]>The Truth About Jamie Oliver's 'Pink Slime'tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.12409832012-01-30T19:00:00-05:002012-03-31T05:12:01-04:00Rob Lyonshttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/rob-lyons/Daily Mail reported that McDonald's in America has responded to a segment in Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution by removing an ingredient called "finely textured lean beef trimmings" from its burgers.

In the segment, Oliver shows a group of parents and children a cow and explains the value of each of the different sections of its body. Then, he says that some parts of the animal were previously regarded as being fit for nothing but dog food, basically because there was so much fat and so little meat. However, a company in the US - Beef Products - has found a way of grabbing that meat. First, the leftover parts are spun in a centrifuge to separate the meat from the fat. The result looks - from what I can tell from the clip - a bit like regular mince. Then, to ensure the product is safe to eat, it is treated with ammonium hydroxide.

What Oliver called 'pink slime' is then added to burgers and other meat products. However, no more than 15% of the finished product can be these 'beef trimmings' and they must be labelled. However, he said in outrage, the ammonium hydroxide does not need to be labelled. No one had suggested that this product is uniquely dangerous - it appears to be safe to eat. Unless you were prepared to eat your burgers rare - and I've never seen McDonald's dish up rare beef - then any bugs not killed off by the ammonium hydroxide should be killed off by cooking.

Yet Oliver bigs up the 'yuk factor' in this process, which he freely admits he is pretty much completely ignorant about. So in this clip, he says: "this is how I imagine the process to be..." before demonstrating that he hasn't got a clue. Particularly irritating is his suggestion that the meat is treated with the kind of ammonia you might use for household cleaning and the implication that children are being fed powerful chemicals that might poison them.

In fact, getting every last bit of meat off a carcass is a good thing, given the cost of rearing a cow. The fact that this is done with a centrifuge rather than by a man with a knife only means the process is more efficient now. Butchers and meat processors are proud of the fact that they use everything but the moo. Little or nothing goes to waste - which is a good thing.

Treatment with ammonium hydroxide is a sensible precaution and was declared safe decades ago. Ammonium hydroxide occurs naturally in the body as part of the process of metabolising protein. It is quickly converted into urea in the liver. In large quantities, it would be poisonous, but in small quantities it is harmless. As a report for the US Food and Drug Administration noted in 1974: "Ammonia and the ammonium ion are integral components of normal metabolic processes and play an essential role in the physiology of man.... There is no evidence in the available information on... ammonium hydroxide... that demonstrates, or suggests reasonable grounds to suspect, a hazard to the public when [it is] used at levels that are now current or that might reasonably be expected in the future."

Jamie Oliver thinks this is all bad because it shows a lack of 'respect' for food and consumers. But if using this kind of product can make foods like burgers cheaper and ensure there is as little waste as possible, why not? Foods like burgers and sausages are all about taking less palatable but perfectly nutritious parts of animals and making them palatable.

If Oliver wants to say that burgers should only be made from the 'finest cuts' of an animal, that's a matter of taste - literally. But when he scaremongers about perfectly safe food on national television, that's pretty slimy.]]>Let's Hear it for Processed Food!tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.9452882011-09-04T19:00:00-04:002011-11-04T05:12:01-04:00Rob Lyonshttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/rob-lyons/right kind of processed food.

A great illustration of the fact that there is nothing wrong, per se, with processed food is a little bit of self-experimentation by Mark Haub, a professor of human nutrition at Kansas State University. Last year for 10 weeks, Haub ate a Twinkie bar every three hours instead of a meal, adding variety to his diet with Doritos, Oreos and sugary cereals. He kept up some semblance of good nutrition by taking multivitamins and throwing in a few vegetables, too.

But most importantly, Haub stuck to eating no more than 1,800 calories per day - well below the 2,500 calories per day usually suggested for men. The result was that Haub lost 27 pounds. This 'convenience store diet' may not have been ideal, but in many respects his health appeared to be better. His cholesterol test results suggested he was in better condition than before, despite this diet of 'junk'.

I once tried a similar experiment myself in response to Morgan Spurlock's movie, Super Size Me. Spurlock piled on the pounds after eating every meal at McDonald's and accepting the offer of 'supersizing' every time it was offered. I tried the same idea, eating every meal at McDonald's for a week. I simply limited my calorie intake and, hey presto, I lost weight. There's nothing particular to processed or convenience food that makes it unhealthy. As long as you get a reasonable balance of the major nutrients - which is fairly easy as long as you have a modicum of variety in your diet, you shouldn't need to take multivitamins - then the mere fact that food is processed is irrelevant.

When asked about his own views on processed food, Haub rightly said this week: 'People have a hatred towards (processed) foods... I like them. I eat them. It's amazing how people believe if it's processed, it's not food.'

In fact, unless you only ever cook food from scratch, you'll be eating processed food. As food writer Justine Brian has noted, olives are processed food. Off the tree, olives are bitter, hard, inedible berries. They must be pickled in brine for four weeks to make them edible. Unless you have a handy local olive tree, you'll be relying on a mass producer to supply you with the finished product. Of course, the same applies to olive oil, spices, marinated artichokes and all manner of other posh nosh.

Instead of making stupid distinctions between processed and 'real' food, the only question worth asking about food is if it is fit to eat - not off, for example - and whether it tastes good. Anything else is just snobbery.]]>Obesity: Have the Experts Just Got it Wrong?tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.9375762011-08-26T06:08:56-04:002011-10-26T05:12:01-04:00Rob Lyonshttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/rob-lyons/The Lancet features a special series of articles on the problem of obesity. As the front cover declares: 'The conclusions are unambiguous. We need collaborative changes in many aspects of our environment to avoid the morbid consequences of overweight and obesity.'

The figures certainly seem startling. The first special article notes that by 2008, an estimated 1.46 billion adults globally were overweight, of whom 502 million were obese. A further 170 million children under 18 years of age were overweight or obese, too. Yet this problem is not simply associated with wealth. While America has obesity rates among women of well over 30 per cent, Japan and Hong Kong have rates well below 10 per cent. Conversely, some relatively poor countries have seen dramatically expanding waistlines: obesity rates in the Pacific nation of Samoa are over 60 per cent and in neighbouring Tonga, it's 70 per cent - twice the level in the USA.

As the same article notes, the consequences are serious. High body weight is 'an established risk factor for disease such as type-2 diabetes, cardiovascular diseases and many cancers', adding that obesity now accounts for between two and six per cent of healthcare costs in many countries.

Leaving aside questions about whether an association between obesity and disease really means that obesity causes that disease, what is driving this 'pandemic' of obesity? The Lancet concludes that the problem is that governments are not willing to take the necessary action to make us cut down on the amount we eat and increase our physical activity. An editorial declares: 'While business and industry, with their very different aim of making as much money as possible and with an enormous and expensive apparatus of clever advertising, are very effective at nudging people to buy and consume their products, non-regulatory measures to increase consumption of healthy food in isolation are unlikely to be effective.'

In other words, big nasty corporations are seducing us with their products and we are simply too powerless to resist. Instead, government should develop some cojones and start regulating these calorie-pushers immediately.

The trouble is, this is nonsense. It's true that McDonald's and Pizza Hut have big advertising budgets, but it is just advertising. Adverts have nothing like the influential power of the medical profession or even the endless diet of media advice about how and why we should lose weight. While we may like fast food, it is a widely held assumption that it is bad for us. In general, the message that we should eat less - and definitely eat less fatty fast food - while exercising more has been internalised by the whole population. Many women - it is particularly true of women - spend their lives lurching from one diet to another, constantly beating themselves up about every mouthful.

So if we get the message, why don't we act upon it? Maybe because the message is wrong. Forty years of advice to eat less, exercise more and cut out the fat has left Brits and Americans fatter than ever before. Yet the diet experts and our health guardians insist that the problem is that we are either too morally weak to deny ourselves or too mentally weak to resist Ronald McDonald. The result will be ever-greater regulation of what companies can sell and what we can eat.

An interesting riposte to this advice has been provided by the American author Gary Taubes. In two recent books Good Calories, Bad Calories and Why We Get Fat, Taubes argues that it's not how much we eat, but what we eat that makes us - or at least, some of us - pile on the pounds. Instead, the problem is that the obsession with eating a low-fat diet - in the misplaced belief that this will prevent heart disease - has led us to eat more carbohydrates instead. For many people, however, their bodies effectively over-react to carbohydrates, pumping out more and more insulin to deal with the high levels of blood sugar that result from eating carbohydrates, particularly sugar.

What's the effect of insulin? To drive the body to store calories as fat and to keep it locked away when your body is crying out for that energy. The result is that you can eat hearty meals, but those calories get stored. Unable to access that stored energy, your body sends the signal that it needs more food: you get hungry again. It's hunger that drives people who are desperate to lose weight to carry on eating, not clever advertising.

For these people, cutting right down on carbs will prevent that hormonal over-reaction and the process will be reversed, all that stored fat gradually being used up. In other words, the correct health advice is not to eat less but to eat fewer carbs. No need for crash diets or expensive gym membership. I certainly find Taubes's ideas extremely plausible, and I've lost a fair amount of weight in recent months by applying them myself.

At the press conference to launch the special issue of The Lancet on Thursday, there was little indication of self-reflection on the part of the panel of experts calling for greater state intervention to tackle obesity (although one researcher, Dr Kevin Hall, did note there was some evidential backing for low-carb diets). Instead, a major theme was to draw parallels between government responses to 'unhealthy' food and tobacco. As any smoker can confirm, if that route is pursued, the result will be less choice, more nagging, higher taxes and more regulation. Doing for food what has been done to cigarettes is a very unappetising idea.]]>